Log on to Facebook or Twitter and you’re likely to see a deluge of political posts – a humorous meme or viral video skewering politicians like Donald Trump, the latest hashtag slogan in response to breaking news, maybe even a social movement symbol as an updated profile picture.

The sharing of political opinion on social media is now ubiquitous. But what does it mean for democracy?

For years, debate has raged about the significance of symbolic, expressive political activity at the level of the everyday citizen.

Critics fear it is simply self-satisfying “slacktivism”. It gives people an easy way to feel they’re contributing to a cause while substituting for more intensive political participation.

Conversely, optimists see a flourishing of civic engagement on the internet that gives people an accessible entry point into politics. If it helps them to develop a sense of political identity and agency, that enables more participation down the line.

These contrasting positions both have merit. Yet are those who take them asking the right questions in the first place?

By evaluating online political expression only in terms of possible impacts on traditional political activity, we risk sidestepping a far more crucial set of issues.

Forget ‘slacktivism’

Myriad organisations and institutions see this citizen-level expression on social media as being far from just a private or personal affair. It is increasingly valued for its aggregate promotional power. The marketing professions know this as electronic word of mouth.

Political groups of all stripes promote social media participation to amplify the reach and credibility of their persuasive messages. Although each individual act of posting, linking, commenting and liking may look insignificant up close, at a macro level they add up to nothing less than the networked spread of ideas.

There is enormous power here for mass persuasion, one viral share at a time. We dismiss this power at our peril.

During the 2016 US presidential election cycle social media soared to new heights of prominence in the political media landscape. It appears we are finally starting to recognise this power for what it is.

For instance, controversy over fake news on sites like Facebook has drawn attention to how peer-to-peer sharing can influence public opinion and even the course of elections (in this case by spreading false and defamatory messages about Hillary Clinton that consolidated her image problems). New research has highlighted how:

… far-right groups develop techniques of ‘attention hacking’ to increase the visibility of their ideas through the strategic use of social media, memes and bots.

The so-called alt-right celebrates its “meme magic” in propagating white nationalist ideology online in service of Trump. The pro-Clinton “Correct the Record” political action committee admits to paying people to post on social media during her primary battle with Bernie Sanders. We are seeing the persuasive value of citizen-level political media coming into sharp focus.

We need to reflect on how we each use this power. That involves thinking through the consequences of what we share online and how it can both strengthen and harm democratic values.

The citizen marketer

Sharing political opinion on social media must be understood in no small part as participation in political marketing. Its practitioners have long circulated persuasive media messages to shape the public mind and influence political outcomes.

This understanding calls for a new kind of media literacy. It requires individuals to acknowledge their own position in circuits of media influence and take seriously their capacity to help shape the flow of political ideas across networks of peers.

We should no longer think of political marketing — or its conceptual forebear, propaganda — as something only powerful elites do. We must recognise that we are all now complicit in this process every time we spread political messages via media platforms that we personally control.

Many citizens are keenly aware of their capacity to persuade their peers through their online posting. They have embraced the role of social media influencer. Most often, they focus on trying to rally the like-minded or undecided, rather than winning over converts from the other side.

This citizen marketer approach to political action can be seen as an outgrowth of the more established concept of the citizen consumer. A citizen consumer deliberately uses their spending power as another way to influence the political sphere.

They may, for instance, buy only environmentally friendly products, or boycott companies whose CEOs donate to campaigns and causes that the consumer opposes. Similarly, we are seeing citizens use their power as micro-level agents of viral media promotion and word-of-mouth endorsement to advance a wide range of political interests and agendas.

There is an enormous opportunity to democratise the flow of political media messages and publicise causes that lie outside the mainstream.

Consider recent activist movements, often built around viral hashtags like #occupywallsteet and #blacklivesmatter. Here, citizens are co-opting the tools and logics of social media marketing to advocate for political ideas that are typically poorly represented in the corporate mass media.

By recognising the potential value of our own grassroots political marketing power, we can gain a foothold in a political media landscape that elite interests traditionally dominated.

Perhaps even more importantly, cultivating a sense of responsibility for what we share on social media puts us in a better position to navigate the emerging digital ecosystem in which these elite actors are capitalising upon — at times even exploiting – our electronic word of mouth.

Know what you are posting, and who you are posting for

Nowadays, major election campaigns and large-scale issue advocacy organisations have professional digital marketing teams. One of their tasks is to spur the promotional labour of everyday citizens to maximise the virality of their messages, whether these people are truly aware of their participation in political marketing or not.

In addition, for-profit political news sites like Breitbart and The Daily Kos have become dependent on social media shares to boost clicks and advertising revenue, as well as to advance their proprietors’ often-partisan agendas.

In this environment, it is crucial that we make informed decisions when we lend our promotional labour and word-of-mouth endorsement to institutional actors and the interests and agendas they represent.

At times we may be eager to act as “brand evangelists” for candidates, parties, advocacy groups or news agencies whose political goals align with our own. At other times developing media literacy might cause us to pause and reflect before we amplify the latest trending political message.

Would these citizens still have posted the image if they knew they were participating in a viral marketing campaign for an organisation that was not universally supported by the LGBT community, and whose message of equality has drawn criticism for emphasising assimilation over radical structural change?

Or would they have chosen instead to amplify an image and an organisation with a different shade of meaning?

These kinds of important conversations can only be opened up if we start to develop a critical literacy of the citizen marketer approach and how it is transforming what it means to be an active participant in our media-dominated, postmodern political reality.

If we see our online political expressions as mere “slacktivism”, a simple private matter, or just having fun with friends, then we become more vulnerable to manipulation by forces that seek to exploit our citizen marketing power to serve agendas that we may not share.

If we become more aware of our position in these circuits of power, we will be better equipped to resist this manipulation.

I’m very excited to announce that my new book, The Citizen Marketer: Promoting Political Opinion in the Social Media Age, is now available from Oxford University Press! I’ve also launched a new website for the book, www.citizenmarketer.org, which includes a blog where I’ll be posting in the future on relevant social media and politics topics. Since I’m putting all my effort behind the new site, I won’t be updating this blog as much anymore, although I invite you to check out the archive here for posts covering 2013-2016.

Here’s a short summary of the new book:

From hashtag activism to the flood of political memes on social media, the landscape of political communication is being transformed by the grassroots circulation of opinion on digital platforms and beyond. By exploring how everyday people assist in the promotion of political media messages to persuade their peers and shape the public mind, Joel Penney offers a new framework for understanding the phenomenon of viral political communication: the citizen marketer. Like the citizen consumer, the citizen marketer is guided by the logics of marketing practice, but, rather than being passive, actively circulates persuasive media to advance political interests. Such practices include using protest symbols in social media profile pictures, strategically tweeting links to news articles to raise awareness about select issues, sharing politically-charged internet memes and viral videos, and displaying mass-produced T-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers that promote a favored electoral candidate or cause. Citizens view their participation in such activities not only in terms of how it may shape or influence outcomes, but as a statement of their own identity. As the book argues, these practices signal an important shift in how political participation is conceptualized and performed in advanced capitalist democratic societies, as they casually inject political ideas into the everyday spaces and places of popular culture.

While marketing is considered a dirty word in certain critical circles — particularly among segments of the left that have identified neoliberal market logics and consumer capitalist structures as a major focus of political struggle — some of these very critics have determined that the most effective way to push back against the forces of neoliberal capitalism is to co-opt its own marketing and advertising techniques to spread counter-hegemonic ideas to the public. Accordingly, this book argues that the citizen marketer approach to political action is much broader than any one ideological constituency or bloc. Rather, it is a means of promoting a wide range of political ideas, including those that are broadly critical of elite uses of marketing in consumer capitalist societies. The book includes an extensive historical treatment of citizen-level political promotion in modern democratic societies, connecting contemporary digital practices to both the 19th century tradition of mass political spectacle as well as more informal, culturally-situated forms of political expression that emerge from postwar countercultures. By investigating the logics and motivations behind the citizen marketer approach, as well as how it has developed in response to key social, cultural, and technological changes, Penney charts the evolution of activism in an age of mediatized politics, promotional culture, and viral circulation.

This week, the third and final debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump took place, and, predictably, the meme-makers of the internet had a field day. From #Nastywoman to #BadHombres to #TrumpBookReport, Clinton supporters were quick to pounce on her rival’s performance with a bevy of mockery and ridicule, making the #BindersFullofWomen moment from the Obama-Romney 2012 debate look like mere child’s play by comparison. Of course, Republicans and Trump supporters have been circulating their fair share of memes as well, and while they haven’t dominated the latest post-debate headlines, their high-profile and controversial use of the Pepe the Frog meme illustrates how the right is catching up with the left in the realm of viral politics. At the same time, given Trump’s over-the-top public persona, it’s no surprise that his bizarre statements and phrasings are playing into the hands of meme parodists like none other.

WIRED has a pretty comprehensive roundup of the major memes of the third debate, in case you haven’t already seen them all in your social media feeds. Also, the LA Times put out an interesting piece this week that puts this phenomenon into a broader historical perspective, noting not only the political internet memes of past election cycles, but also their connection to the traditions of political posters and cartoons, as well as image appropriation and manipulation more generally. However, while discussions of political memes tend to focus on the comic creativity of meme-makers and the cultural literacy required to make sense of them, I for one would like to see more analysis of how political memes are taking on the role of campaign marketing and advertising in the age of social media.

Indeed, this is a major theme of my research on the persuasive dimension of online political expression, including my upcoming book The Citizen Marketer (more details soon to follow)! Yes, it is certainly true that political memes may sometimes be completely frivolous and trivial, as I believe was the case with the Ken Bone memes from the second debate that seemed to have little to do with politics whatsoever. And yes, they do tend to circulate in the so-called ‘echo chambers’ of the internet, meaning that anti-Trump memes will mainly be seen by those who already don’t like him and thus may not change many minds. However, the fundamentally partisan nature of so many of today’s political memes cannot be ignored, and their resemblance to the propaganda posters and cartoons of the past underscores their role in processes of political persuasion.

The post-debate memes in particular illustrate their function as crowdsourced agenda-framing devices – in other words, by making Trump’s “nasty woman” or “bad hombres” remarks into memes and hashtags that are repeated and played with over and over, these moments come to define the debate itself for those who keep encountering them online (in lieu of other debate moments that don’t get the same meme treatment). It is no surprise that Clinton supporters would want to define the third debate in terms of Trump’s most extreme and offensive comments, and memes, like the Janet Jackson one pictured above, do precisely that.

And even though memes are seemingly ephemeral viral moments in pop culture, they do have a lasting power to frame larger political events – indeed, #BindersFullofWomen is probably the ONLY thing that people still remember about the second Obama-Romney debate of 2012. While political memes are often entertaining and silly, their role in the agenda-framing process should not be dismissed or taken lightly. For instance, thanks in no small part to the outpouring of memes and hashtags, “nasty woman” is now being talked about as a major flashpoint for feminist mobilization around Clinton in the final weeks of the campaign. So let’s not kid ourselves, even as we kid around with memes – viral politics is serious business.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in The Guardian‘s fantastic new tech-themed podcast, “Chips With Everything,” in an episode covering the wide world of political internet memes. Along with Paolo Gerbaudo of King’s College London, I talk about the definition and history of memes, their adoption by political campaigns and social movement activists, and their ability to draw citizens into the political process through accessible humor and entertaining pop culture references. Furthermore, I address how “people use these forms for political expression, to express their views, their opinions, and often in ways that they may see as spreading an idea that’s influential, that’s even persuasive.”

Towards the end, I also discuss my research on the Facebook marriage equality profile picture campaign, and make the point that political meme-spreading campaigns are often intended to heighten people’s identification with causes and move them towards additional forms of participation (in direct contrast to “slacktivism” fears).

Political memes are now a global phenomenon, and Brazil is no exception. The country’s recent political turmoil involving the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff has inspired a huge outpouring of humor and commentary on social media, and this in turn has launched a national conversation about the role of political memes in Brazilian democracy. Writing for Nexo Journal, journalist Ana Freitas suggests that “memes help deal with frustrations and make policy more ‘cool’, but the debate may be shallow.” I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Freitas for the article, and you can check it out here (in Portuguese, but Google Translate can help). Basically, the point I make in the interview is that political memes have the potential to make politics both more accessible and more simplified and polarizing, as politicians like Rousseff are interpreted through the lens of popular culture and cast as Hollywood heroes and villains (mostly villains, in Rousseff’s case).

A think piece by Gigi Trabasso for Affinity Magazine (in English) comes to a very similar conclusion. Trabasso argues that Brazilian teens in particular are missing something important when their understanding of politics is limited to the circulation of memes:

Social media has been the main source of information regarding Brazil’s political state, not television outlets. Following the natural order, the young adult, teen population leads social media and, predominant on every culture, memes. For many, memes are currently the main (sometimes only) source of political information and updates on the nation’s political, economic, and social crisis. Now, one might assure that memes, the most recent form of comedy and humor, would be the greatest way to deal with such tragic times. It is true that Brazilians always seem to find a joke to crack, the silver lining, but once the topic at hand is a corrupt government, memes are not enough. The problem the country has encountered among its teenagers is poor interpretation an laziness. Through memes, one image becomes the representation of a political ideology, one nickname defines a politician, and no one is efficient enough to investigate the nature behind said jokes.

Now, I don’t entirely agree with the notion that political memes will always lead to “poor interpretation” of issues – in fact, sometimes it may be the opposite, as popular culture can become a resource for making resonant meanings out of complex political and social realities. However, it is quite clear that Brazil’s political media landscape, memes included, is currently experiencing many of the same tensions between style and substance that we’ve seen in the U.S., the U.K, and many other countries. Just as in these other national contexts, the phenomenon of political memes in Brazil is bound to have an impact, for better or for worse.

Is Bernie Sanders the most important social media story of the U.S. presidential election so far? What is the connection between #FeelTheBern and the #Occupy movement? How is Donald Trump proving that political discourse and social media discourse are one in the same in 2016? And how do popular culture memes, like the Back to the Future-referencing one above, create entry points for citizens to make meanings out of the political? I discuss all these topics and more in my conversation with Merrill Brown for cable TV’s Carpe Diem – here’s the video:

In recent years, it has become conventional wisdom that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter serve as democratic platforms for citizens to express their political views and opinions. The key assumption underlying this idea is that these sites operate on a peer-to-peer sharing structure that allows anyone to communicate to a public audience with their posts—provided, of course, that these audience members are connected to them as “Friends,” “Followers,” etc. Therefore, a social media user’s level of reach and influence (including political influence) could be understood as simply a matter of how many connections they have in their networks.

However, as Facebook has moved more and more towards a model of complex algorithmic news feed filtering, the notion that one’s posts will actually be seen by one’s peers is increasingly being called into question. This development, which is likely to become industry standard, may have important consequences for the use of social media as a platform of political expression.

At the moment, these sorts of concerns about Facebook are largely centered on the diminishing “organic reach” of organizational Facebook Pages, such as those of non-profit activist groups (in addition to businesses and brands). What is “organic reach,” you ask? As B. Traven explains in a great piece for ValleyWag,

Put simply, “organic reach” is the number of people who potentially could see any given Facebook post in their newsfeed. Long gone are the days when Facebook would simply show you everything that happened in your network in strict chronological order. Instead, algorithms filter the flood of updates, posts, photos, and stories down to the few that they calculate you would be most interested in. (Many people would agree that these algorithms are not very good, which is why Facebook is putting so much effort into refining them.) This means that even if I have, say, 400 friends, only a dozen or so might actually see any given thing I post. One way to measure your reach, then, is as the percentage of your total followers who (potentially) see each of your posts. This is the ratio that Facebook has more-or-less publicly admitted it is ramping down to a target range of 1-2% for Pages. In other words, even if an organization’s Page has 10,000 followers, any given item they post might only reach 100-200 of them.

As Traven argues, this lowered capacity for political organizations to send messages to their own followers significantly compromises Facebook’s role as an open marketplace of political expression. The only way that organizations can truly bypass these filters is to pay Facebook to promote their posts, and while major commercial brands (and perhaps major party candidates) can afford the price, small non-profits and advocacy groups largely cannot. Thus, Facebook is starting to look less like an even playing field for political communication and more like television, where big-ticket ad buys dominate and the resource-rich get a much louder megaphone than the resource-poor.

However, I can’t help but think that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The impact of news feed filtering will likely extend far beyond the realm of organizational Facebook Pages, which are already experiencing the effects of a diminished “organic reach.” Now that we know that Facebook is making behind-the-scenes decisions about which posts you will see from your connections and which posts will be hidden from you, how else could this model end up skewing the flow of online political discourse?

To explore this question, it is helpful to understand exactly how Facebook currently filters its News Feeds. However, this is not as easy as it sounds. According to TechCrunch, the algorithm that sorts Facebook News Feeds uses over 100,000 different factors to determine the relevance of posts. Among the most important factors are the following (as told to TechCrunch by Facebook News Feed Director of Product Management Will Cathart):

• How popular (Liked, commented on, shared, clicked) are the post creator’s past posts with everyone• How popular is this post with everyone who has already seen it• How popular have the post creator’s past posts been with the viewer• Doe the type of post (status update, photo, video, link) match what types have been popular with the viewer in the past• How recently was the post published

In addition, Facebook recently announced that it would push to prioritize “high-quality” content in users’ feeds and reduce the amount of spam posts. What constitutes “high quality” in Facebook’s eyes? Here is how the company defines it on its website:

While the goal of News Feed is to show high quality posts to people, we wanted to better understand what high quality means. To do this we decided to develop a new algorithm to factor into News Feed. To develop it, we first surveyed thousands of people to understand what factors make posts from Pages high quality. Some of the questions we asked included:• Is this timely and relevant content?• Is this content from a source you would trust?• Would you share it with friends or recommend it to others?• Is the content genuinely interesting to you or is it trying to game News Feed distribution? (e.g., asking for people to like the content)• Would you call this a low quality post or meme?• Would you complain about seeing this content in your News Feed?

In other words, Facebook is ostensibly adopting a model of ‘giving people what they want,’ rather than making editorial decisions about quality based on their professional judgment. Indeed, in a piece for Fortune, Matthew Ingram writes that “Facebook’s director of news partnerships, Andy Mitchell, rejected the idea that the social platform is some kind of gatekeeper when it comes to the discovery of news, saying Facebook doesn’t control the news-feed — users control it by telling Facebook what they are interested in. In other words, Facebook sees itself as merely reflecting the desires of its users.” Critics, on the other hand, have pointed out that the process is still susceptible to censorship based on various national laws as well as the site’s own community standards.

However, an even bigger potential issue here is how news feed filtering may pave the way for Facebook (and social media sites more generally) to manipulate the flow of news and political expression along ideological lines. Surely, the company would vehemently deny doing this. Yet I couldn’t help but think of what the recent gay rights-celebrating rainbow profile picture campaign suggests about Facebook’s capacity to elevate the flow of posts that display a particular political point of view. Did Facebook actually favor these rainbow picture posts in its News Feed algorithm, above and beyond the criteria outlined above? Honestly, I have no idea. Yet the very fact that the company itself orchestrated this particular meme on its own platform indicates that it is not entirely above the fray of partisan political battles, and furthermore, appears willing to leverage its prominent position in the viral media culture to advance certain political ideas.

Since I strongly support the sentiment behind the rainbow profile pictures, it’s hardly a sticking point for me. However, the campaign seems to complicate Facebook’s insistence on being a fully neutral channel for political discourse with no vested interests beyond serving the most relevant content to its users. Could it be possible that the site would play with its algorithms to filter down the reach of posts that it deems inimical to its worldview, or boost the flow of posts that support issues favored by its leadership? This may sound like conspiracy theory territory, but Facebook has opened Pandora’s Box in a very real sense by moving to a model of news feed manipulation.

What, then, could be a solution to this looming threat? It seems unreasonable to argue that Facebook should simply go back to its original model of showing every piece of content from Friends in the order in which they were posted. As the company often points out, there are so many people and organizations now on Facebook that an average user has approximately 1,500 posts that are eligible to show up in their News Feed every day—i.e. far too many to wade through. Twitter, by contrast, has had a long-standing commitment to showing every tweet from a user’s connections in chronological order, but recently announced via the New York Times that they are “question[ing] our reverse chronological timeline” in order to stay competitive and profitable.

At a time of increasing news feed manipulation, what I’d like to see is not only more transparency about how these feeds are actually filtered (which could alleviate fears over ideological bias), but also more user choice about how the criteria are applied. In other words, Facebook users should be able to decide how much “organic reach” they receive from their own connections. Now, it is true that Facebook already allows users to control their feeds to some extent by hiding posts from specific “Friends.” However, these options can be greatly expanded. Want to see more posts from your political organization Pages than just the default 1-2%? You should be able to choose such an option with a simple click of a button. Want to see more political posts that diverge from your views, rather than just seeing those that the algorithm determines you’d be most likely to “Like?” You should be able to have that choice in the settings. Putting users in more control of their own news feeds would go a long way towards mitigating concerns that social media sites like Facebook are becoming the new political media gatekeepers.